


Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought, Alone

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [14]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: (Or is it?), Character Death, Demon Traps, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, M/M, Magical Attacks, The Folly, technical spoiler for Hanging Tree, the Faceless Man is a dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-06 03:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12203229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: The first thing Abdul Walid did upon feeling Thomas Nightingale’s broken neck under his hands was turn to the paramedic at his elbow and declare time of death. The second thing he did was leave for the Folly.[Contains a technical spoiler forThe Hanging Tree.]





	Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought, Alone

*

**2018**

The first thing Abdul Walid did upon feeling Thomas Nightingale’s broken neck under his hands was turn to the paramedic at his elbow and declare time of death. The second thing he did was leave for the Folly.

He took a cab, knowing he couldn’t drive safely, and let his head fall into his hands to keep out the wail of sirens and the flashing lights of the police cars behind him. It took a while for the car to make its way away from St. Katherine’s Dock; last he had seen it the central dock was flooded high, the _Amsterdam_ anchor had been leaning precariously out over the Thames, and the Girl with a Dolphin statue had been in pieces on the Embankment. London had yet another architectural victim it could attribute to magic, and it also, thanks to the partial collapse of the Telford Footbridge, had one less wizard.

His mobile rang, and the caller ID said CAFFREY.

“ _Shit, Abdul_ ,” Frank said immediately when he picked up, without Abdul having to say anything. “ _I’m so fucking sorry, mate_.”

“I know.”

“ _I’ve had a look at the original agreement,_ ” Frank continued. “ _I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to help you, now_.”

“The arrangement was personal?”

“ _Yes, it mentions Thomas by name. Most lawyers – and especially Tyburn – would use that to claim that our protection was for the man, not the house. I’ll come by and sit on your doorstep for as long as I can, but if they know their rights there won’t be much I can do to stop them from coming inside._ ”

“Please do that. I’ll handle the rest.”

Abdul took a deep breath, told himself to stop shivering, and looked blankly out into the city crawling by his window. 

***

 

_Abdul!_

 

*** 

It was nearing midnight when he arrived at the Folly; he let himself into the front door as quietly as he could, and, considering the options for his protection and what he knew he had to do in the dark, crossed silently over to the sitting room and peered at the statues and displays that loomed on its walls. In the end, he chose a broadsword that he seemed to remember had been a ceremonial gift via the Knights of the Garter in the eighteenth century, hefted it down from the mantelpiece, and then, his knuckles white around its hilt, went over to the half-lit door to the kitchen.

Molly had the radio on, which explained how he’d managed to get away with not being noticed by her so far; she looked somewhat unsettled as she sat on the kitchen floor and peered into the oven at something that smelled wonderfully of garlic, two fingers worrying slightly at her lip and chin and her other hand clenched tightly in Toby’s fur where he lay by her side.

Abdul realized it then – the lightness of the air, the sudden dead staleness of every room in the house. She knew something was wrong, but hadn’t quite yet figured out that it was the loss of the magical wards.

“Molly,” he said clearly, and, startled, she looked up at him, and then rose instantly to her feet in alarm.

“I need you to listen to me carefully and not leave the house,” Abdul said, as evenly as he could manage. “Thomas is dead.”

He barely got the sword up in time: she flew at him, transformed with rage and fear, and the room exploded into seething tendrils of black. He fell back a step and managed to get the blade across the doorway; she hissed at him over it, eyes transfixed and her tongue furling out as though desperate to eat him.

And then she stopped, and grew pale, and shrank, and, without a sound, fled into the corner of the kitchen and down the steps there into the pitch-black of the cellars.

 _Ya Allah sa’edna,_ he thought, grief-stricken at what he was forcing her to confront. He came into the kitchen, patted a very confused and suddenly hyperactive Toby back into quietude, and then made himself what he hoped would be a cup of cure-all tea. That done, he took it to the cellar doorway, sat in the entrance with the sword’s tip pointed down the stairs, and waited.

*** 

 

_Abdul, wake up._

 

***

It was nearing dawn when Molly came back up into the light. Abdul had spent the intervening five hours praying, both in his mind and out loud, letting Toby fall asleep with his head in Abdul’s lap, and thanking Allah that he had not, at least, been looking in the right direction at the right time to see the light go out of Thomas’s eyes. He took a break at three, leaving the sword behind, to do some busywork in the library when he felt the grief rushing up on him too strongly to leave him sane, and came back half an hour later to find the front door still locked and the cellar still dark.

There was movement below him, finally; he heard her coming slowly up the stairs, and, despite himself, found himself gripping the swordhilt hard with one hand, wondering how ready he was to put her out of her misery if she were to attack him again.

But he didn’t need to make that choice; her shadowy form reached out and tilted the blade away from her, and then she sat next to him, pulling his arm around her as she put her damp face to his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “We think Chorley got away, but Peter’s after him.”

She drew in a sharp breath and clutched briefly at his shirtfront, but of course said nothing.

***

 

_What’s happened?_

_Demon-trap in the pavement outside the Folly. Whatever it’s done, it’s not physical._

_What’s wrong with him?_

_He thinks I’m dead, for a start._

_Shit._

 

***

It was nearing seven when he heard car doors start to slam in the direction of the coach house, and he smiled grimly, looking down into Molly’s wide eyes.

“I think we’re about to have guests,” he murmured. “And I think I might need reinforcement.”

Molly moved like shadow itself, and re-emerged from the cellar a few moments later with a veritable arsenal of world war-era rifles and pistols in her crooked arms, dusty grenades spilling out of the pockets in her apron. Abdul almost laughed at the maniacal look in her face, and chose, for old time’s sake, the Browning; the sword he hefted back over his shoulder for effect as well as security.

The doorbell rang, sharply; when he marched into the corridor and opened the double doors the whole lot of them were there, Mama Thames and Tyburn and Lea and Fleet and Effra and Beverley, all in their best finery and arguing volubly with Peter and Frank Caffrey as they futilely tried to protest that no, they couldn’t come in, could they not wait a fucking day out of respect for the dead –

“Mama,” Abdul nodded, and quite enjoyed the pop-eyed look he got from Peter as he raised the Browning in their general direction. “I’m afraid you are not welcome here at this time.”

“Oh god,” Peter said faintly. He looked at Tyburn, who was rapidly flushing with fury, and attempted a grin. “I mean, I’m pretty sure his Hippocratic Oath means he wouldn’t fire – but I’m not sure I can promise it, frankly.”

“This city belongs to me,” Mama Thames said; no doubt to others she sounded reasonable and regal, but to Abdul’s ears she sounded like the insidious whisper of a flood as it rose through a room, like sea-monsters and the grind of salt. “In the absence of its Master the Folly belongs to it, and so to the rivers, for all of our protection.”

“Terribly sorry, but no,” Abdul said. He was impressing himself with how steady he was able to keep the pistol as even Peter turned to him in muted surprise. “Legally speaking, this house belongs to me. You can take it up with HMRC or the Commissioner if you like, but I think you’ll find the paperwork and the law quite clear.”

Beverley sucked in a surprised breath, peering at Abdul wide-eyed from the back of the group.

“He willed it to you,” Tyburn realized slowly, appalled and resigned all at once. “When did this happen?”

“2014,” Abdul said shortly, not wanting to waste the details of a concept as precious as his marriage on them. “You and Peter will have to sort out the magical side of things, but the Folly and the land it sits on are mine for the moment. And right now, you’re trespassing.”

“Come on, Ty,” Beverley said, sounding pissed off with every one of them, and though Tyburn and Mama lingered for a few more frustrated moments, the retreat was on. Frank warily watched them go from the pavement, and then quickly ushered Peter and Abdul inside, not attempting – wisely – to take the weapons out of Abdul’s cramped hands.

“Bloody hell,” he said simply, once they were behind the protection of all the locks.

Peter was pale and looked thin within his clothes, Abdul saw, and the rims of his eyes were red; there was so much to speak of, he knew, but he also knew that there was more important work to be done.

“Peter, come through to the library,” he said gently, and turned to start walking there himself. “I’ve pulled out the books you’ll need to study to re-establish the wards.”

“Right,” Peter said, with a hard sniff, and followed next to Abdul, wiping at his eyes. “Was that a bluff you pulled back there, or – ?”

“Oh, it’s quite real,” Abdul said, shaking his head as they entered the library, ablaze with light and scattered with all the volumes he had searched through before finding the right ones. “The paperwork is in a folder on that farthest bookshelf – Thomas had his will changed the moment we gave the council notice of our marriage.”

The inheritance tax would be murderous, he thought – and it was that idea which finally felled him. His hands opened nervelessly and the Browning and the sword clattered inelegantly to the ground; he made an unconscious attempt to catch himself on a nearby table, missed, and, like a marionette that had had its strings cut, simply found himself caving forward from his knees into the floor. He had utterly no control over the noise he made into the carpet until Peter fetched up beside him, but whatever it was didn’t sound human.

“Fuck,” he heard Peter whisper, and then his hands were on Abdul’s shoulder and side, not knowing what on earth to do. “Oh, fuck.”

***

 

  _Uh, yeah, so I’m thinking the effects of a trap which says ‘tantibus’ all over it are not going to be pleasant._

_A nightmare jack-in-the-box. How very like Chorley to play this sort of game._

_Shouldn’t we wake him up?_

_I’ve already attempted to. At this point, I’m starting to suspect we have to let it run its course – waking him in the middle of it might cause its own ill effects._

_…he looks awful._

_I know._

 

*** 

They all ended up in the coach house, eventually, squashed into Peter’s sofa. Abdul’s breakdown seemed to give pause to all proceedings; Peter looked fragile as glass as he flicked through channels on his television, his jaw taut and teeth grinding, and even Molly put her stockinged feet up on the tattered cushions, half-curled into Abdul’s side. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he remembered dreaming in fits and starts about morgue drawers and flashes of light and the splash of water.

“They’ve taken him to the morgue at UCH,” Peter said to Abdul at one point; he was often on the phone, pacing back and forth across the coach house and past where Frank was keeping vigil with his mobile pressed hard to his ear, and was careening visibly between hopelessness and rage. “They seemed to think you’d – you know, that you’d want to – ”

He stopped, and swallowed, and then looked appalled at himself for saying anything at all. “I told them to get stuffed.”

Abdul held out a hand, and Peter took it, and sat precipitously down. “I’m going to fall apart now, I think,” he announced, and promptly did.

When Abdul woke the next morning, he spent some time going quietly around the house. He rolled up the spare prayer rug that was in the library; he retrieved odds and ends and medical books he had left piled in a corner of the laboratory, and made note of the samples he would have packed up and delivered to UCH. After an hour, he managed to make himself enter Thomas’s bedroom, and went slowly through the various drawers in chests and armoires; in one of them, he knew, there was a silver pocketwatch with Thomas’s photograph in it (it had probably belonged to David Mellenby at some stage, but Thomas had never offered up that story and Abdul had never thought it kind to ask). When he found it, he put it directly into his own pocket without opening it, and then closed up the silent room again, plunging it into darkness behind its heavy curtains.

Something of a usual morning routine had returned to the ground floor; Molly had somehow scraped together a breakfast service, which Frank (he must have taken leave in order to stay, and Abdul hoped it was apparent how grateful they all were for it) was quietly tucking into. Peter was sitting over his books in the library, the dark circles under his eyes black and stark, and Molly herself was back in the kitchen when Abdul found her.

“Molly,” he said; she turned to look at him, dazed, from where she was scrubbing the immaculate floor for the umpteenth time. “If I told you to pack a bag, would you come away with me?”

Her safety, her future, her duty to the house – it was all there in how her eyes flared with alarm, then narrowed, then widened again.

“You can come back anytime you like,” Abdul added, as calm as he could be. “But I’ll still ask.”

Three hours later, she was waiting for him next to the Jag. The clothes she was wearing made her look impossibly glamorous, despite being from an era more suited to the fifties – a dark a-line skirt, silk blouse and beret, with her face hidden under sunglasses and a half-veil. The trunk she had fitted into the boot of the Jag he recognized as Thomas’s, and of army issue.

“Keep the car for as long as you like, I’ll manage,” Peter said as he saw them off. He was starting to look better, though in ways Abdul would have never wished upon him: he seemed older, overnight, and the weight of responsibility which Abdul knew he had never quite aspired to loomed in his face. “Besides, the Met’ll have to promote me now – so, new kit, I reckon.”

“We’ll be back soon,” Abdul promised, shaking Peter’s hand firmly. “If there’s anything you need for the case or investigation, call. And I’ll contact our lawyer to initiate the process of transferring the Folly over to you.”

“Don’t bother with the legalese if you don’t want to – I’m starting to think it’s rather a good idea to keep the Folly’s ownership out of contention with the rest of the whole fucking demimonde.”

It was Peter who gave Molly a tight, proud hug; it was soon-to-be-DI Grant who walked away from them back into the Folly. By the time they drove up and parked in front of Abdul’s home on Albert St, it took him a long time to prise his hands off the steering wheel, so unmoored was his entire world.

*** 

 

_Right, so I’ve gotten the trap under a microscope. Look, uh – some of the lettering also says ‘insania.’_

_Well. I suppose we know what those intended ill effects are, then._

_What now?_

_We can attempt to lead him back, but I think he’ll have to do most of that work on his own._

 

***

Molly astonished him, in the first few days. He helped make up the spare room on the first floor for her, but the rest of it was entirely her own doing. She ventured out into the sun of his back garden to sweep up leaves left from the previous autumn and set the little iron-wrought table he hardly ever sat at for dinner; she disappeared for two hours and came home laden with shopping bags from Tesco’s, inscrutable in continental slacks and a black turtleneck. She fed Toby raw chicken in the kitchen whenever Peter took him for walks which inevitably led him north to Albert St, somehow managed to figure out how every setting on Abdul’s laundry machines worked in the space of about seventy-two hours, and read her way rapidly through the entirety of Abdul’s rarely-touched collection of Penguin classics, curled up with her chin on her knees in a particular armchair next to the front windows.

The same day she returned to the Folly to begin what would become a routine of twice-weekly cleanings for Peter, Abdul went back to UCH and signed off on the paperwork that would deliver Thomas’s body to his undertakers of choice.

A year later, he was able to read the autopsy report, and regretted, for the first time, that he had been incapable of carrying it out himself. The thought of it still horrified him, but he considered it a sure mark of recovery that he was able to think it at all.

Five years after that, he didn’t mark what would have been their tenth – or twentieth, depending on your parameters – anniversary. He did find himself looking at the portrait in the pocketwatch, often, thinking that it, at least, was a tether not only to his past but pasts beyond it. The little round photograph of Thomas had been taken before he went off to war; he was hatless, but in uniform, and in half-profile like a nineteenth-century colonel looking off towards the battlefield.

It was quintessential.

It was also roundabout that time that Peter called to say, almost shyly, that Beverley was going to move into the Folly (not to worry, he had fixed it with the wards) and could they come to dinner? And in the company of the grinning pair of them in the mid-summer garden, festooned as it had been by Molly with candles and fairy lights, Abdul realized that Albert St, as well as the Folly, had become a place of happiness again without him noticing.

He had always known that the agreement he had made with Thomas in 2004 was unlikely to be honored in full. There were too many what-ifs, especially once Peter was made apprentice: what if Thomas was to be perpetually immortal, what if either of them were to be felled by something magical, what if, as might have been usual to any other partnership, their circumstances or feelings were to change. Making it legal in the eyes of Her Majesty’s Government had helped renew and confirm their commitment, but did nothing to change those facts.

But it was then, in his sixties, when his hair was starting to go white, when his colleagues and students started to treat him with a fresh sort of kindness and care, when Molly and Peter started urging him (both verbally and manipulatively, with the help of the comforts of home and the ever more sophisticated and less-demanding equipment Peter managed to wheedle out of the police force) that he could afford to start slowing down – that he realized that of all the things he might have called his worst nightmare, losing Thomas was not the end of his world, and that they had never lived in fear.

The pain of it was real, but the regret never would be.

 _You haven’t won, Martin Chorley_ , he thought, and, closing the pocketwatch and slipping it back into his trousers, got up to start another new day.

 

***

 

Abdul opened his eyes slowly, his throat and tongue dry with thirst.

He was curled up on one of the sitting room’s sofas, but it had been moved – he was looking at the breakfast table from under the corner of the duvet that had been pulled up to his shoulders, at which Peter and Thomas were sitting. Peter was eating his way through what looked like a full English, a slight pinch of guilt in his face, whereas Thomas, with his suit jacket over the back of his chair and a frown of concern beetling his forehead, was fiddling with a half-empty cup of coffee.

“H’lo,” Abdul rasped, and they both perked up and looked at him; Peter grinned, with his teeth full of egg and toast, and Thomas got neatly up and came over to crouch next to the sofa, putting a hand on Abdul’s.

“Hello to you,” Thomas said warmly. “You gave us quite a scare.”

“Knew the moment I stepped on that paving stone,” Abdul said, groaning a little as he turned onto his back and blinked to clear his vision. “Like a landmine. Couldn’t stop myself in time from letting the pressure off.”

“We figured as much,” Peter said, dragging over his chair so he could join the conversation. “It was a nasty little fucker, primed with a previously-unknown spell. You’ve been out for two days.”

“I don’t suppose you managed to get me hooked up to an EEG, did you?” Abdul yawned.

“We were a bit more concerned with you ever waking up again at all than collecting data, mate,” Peter said, sounding exasperated and fond.

Abdul looked at Thomas, and reached out to put a hand on his arm. “You’re still here,” he smiled.

“Yes,” Thomas nodded, his expression softening. “We had an idea of what you must have been seeing.”

Abdul looked over at Peter, who had the decency to look a little embarrassed at being a part of what he would no doubt later call a ‘moment.’ “How are you and Beverley Brook these days?”

“Er,” Peter said, and promptly blushed. “That information’s privileged.”

“Well, hurry it up,” Abdul grinned, only half-joking. “Regrets are overrated.”

“Thanks. I think,” Peter said, and hurriedly took his still half-full plate off to the kitchen.

“I’m glad,” Thomas murmured, edging in closer. “We feared the worst – from what we can tell, the spell was meant to drive a man beyond his endurance.”

Abdul ignored the relief and fear contained in Thomas’s euphemism, and smiled again instead. “I think Chorley will find that the two of us are the wrong targets for that sort of thing,” he said, and reached up to pull Thomas down into him.

 _No time wasted, and all time gained_ , he thought, and slid gratefully back into a dreamless sleep.

*

**Author's Note:**

> This was brought to you by my simultaneous desires to a) write what happens to the Folly after Thomas's death and b) not write that or have it be true ever in a million years. Phew. Title comes from William Wordsworth's poem _The Prelude_ (1850), in a section which mentions Newton.
> 
> This is the last plot bunny I have for this series at the moment, but I LOVE getting prompts! If you have anything you'd like to see from me in this 'verse or otherwise for RoL, do let me know in the comments (you've probably gotten an idea of what I like and am vaguely good at by now). And as ever, thanks for reading. :-)


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